Property registration reforms, which allow for faster service, have put Thailand in the top 10 in the category of time required to register a property.

Banyat: 'e-land' to be completed by 2005

The agency winning kudos behind the scenes is the Lands Department. Local land offices in Chiang Mai, Rayong and Songkhla received awards earlier this year for best public service from the Office of the Public Sector Development Commission.

"Faster service is the result of government reforms, which aim to reduce processing time by 30-50%," said the department's director-general Banyat Jansena, who initiated work process reductions in all the department's services in November of 2003. He expects all the work to be done by the end of 2007.

Currently, the steps required for manual land mortgage registrations have been decreased from eight steps to five. In terms of time spent, the process has been shortened from 2.5 hours to only an hour and seven minutes, excluding 1.5 hours for examining land rights documentation.

The department was recently given a score of 3.82 out of five by people using its service, in a survey conducted by the National Institute of Development Administration (Nida).

Mr Banyat also said that land allocation applications, another government service playing an important role in economic development, will be reduced from 166 working days to 52.

The department is now working on a pilot project for IT development with a budget of 184 million baht.

An electronic, web-based land office, dubbed "e-land", and a national land database, are expected to be completed by the end of 2005.

Mr Banyat said all local land offices in the country would join the e-land office and networking system by the end of 2007.

Although some critics say the project's 8.8-billion-baht budget for putting 400 land offices online is too high, he estimates that the improved service will pay for itself within four years, given the department's revenue of about 45.5 billion baht for the 2004 fiscal year.

Additional revenue could be generated for the department by charging fees for online data services such as land price assessments.

"From the day they are born, people are involved in land issues. Whether for residence, earning a living or commercial use, land is of enormous value. Having an effective land database is essential during this period of economic growth, especially amid the current property boom with its large number of land transactions," he said.

About 40 branches in Bangkok have already established e-land services, but their databases cannot be linked together due to technical problems, Mr Banyat said.

After establishing the land database, the department will create a national land information centre. All land data from agencies like the forestry and national parks departments will be merged under a single digitised platform in order to create a comprehensive land data network. As a result, there will be only one title of a single standard for all types of land.

"Land owners will be able to access land documents using their 13-digit identity card through our web site. More importantly, counterfeit land documents will become a thing of the past once it becomes possible to examine them online in minutes. The current manual system takes up to a month," Mr Banyat explained.